Exploring the intersections of social class, education and identity

Last week, the Pew Charitable Trust released a series of three reports on economic mobility across generations, in hopes of providing “information and tools that will provide the nation’s leaders with an objective and accurate picture of the status and health of the American Dream.

You can find all three reports here, or download a two page “fact sheet” here.

While the release of the reports was covered widely in the news, I’m finding little in the blogosphere about the reports’ overall findings that depending on one’s starting points, income mobility may be more limited than many Americans believe.

An exception is the Wall Street Journal’s Wealth Report, where Robert Frank contrasts the finding of the reports that family background still strongly influences where one winds up on the economic ladder with recent reports supporting the belief that in the U.S.,
“wealth is [now] ruled by the entrepreneur and the middle-class guy made good”.

And over at Writing in the Wild, Ray Watkins provides a good summary of the reports and insight into the possible “glass half-full/half empty” interpretations of their findings.

In contrast, No Oil for Pacifists seems to have given the Pew Reports a very quick read, indeed. Ignoring the high rates of downward mobility of African American children from middle-income families, he proclaims that

“the economic prospects for African-Americans has improved dramatically since the mid 1970s; I suspect the gains over the past decade are closer to those of whites”.

Similarly, he proclaims that unlike Europe, “nearly everyone in America has the chance to be rich”, when the Pew Reports repeat the findings that are widely cited elsewhere: that America is a less mobile society than other developed nations. He’s missed, also, one of the report’s central findings: that much of the growth in family income in the past generation is attributable to more women going to work, not to the ease by which ambitious people simply work their way into wealth.

The Washington Post’s Michael Fletcher’s on-line Q and A focused on diverse explanations for the fall of so many African Americans from middle income status, while Get Religion, going far beyond the data used in these reports, insists that these long-term economic trends can be explained by individual choices (decline in involvement in religion, single parenthood) made by African Americans.

Insisting, instead, that the data in the reports are evidence of ongoing racism, Jack and Jill Politics blog takes exception to NPR’s Juan Williams’ essay on the divergence of black culture and values along class lines.

It will be interesting to follow Pew’s ongoing work on this project of careful scrutiny of the American Dream — and to follow, also, the public discourse that their work generates.